May 2008

I don’t think I’ve ever written about a Russian t-shirt site before, so I guess this is another country that we can cross off the map (if I had a map like that, which I don’t).I’d actually found out about Blokk a few months ago, bookmarked them, and then promptly forgot to write an article. Luckily I was reminded by the company themselves of their existence, and I decided it was about time that I did my bit to try and thaw Anglo-Russian diplomatic relations. If anything can fix things after we might have spied on them, and a Russian got radiation poisoning in Britain under dubious circumstances, I’m sure writing about an awesome t-shirt company will do the trick.

They’ve got 4 designs up for sale at the moment, and I’d describe each and every one of them as pure, unadulterated torso-candy. Three of them were done by an in-house artist (Klokki), and oneby a Ukrainian artist called Irena Zablotska (also known as Joulu) as their first collaboration ina . There’s no real unifying theme to the designs, both in terms of style and subject, which is surprising considering Klokki accounts for 75% of what’s available. That isn’t an issue though, since, as was previously mentioned, all the tees are chocked full of awesome.There isn’t a whole load of English on their site, but you should be able to work things out just by clicking around, and you can make an order by e-mailing them if you aren’t in Russia (and judging by my traffic logs, you probably aren’t).

This ones for you Kevin. Terratag have a page on their site that has ‘end of line’ and overstock items on sale for around 50% of their original price, which pretty much brings them into line with a premium tee if you’re an American, and is damn cheap by British standards. I guess that the items on sale will be changing all the time, and I’d be the first to admit that they aren’t exactly selling my favourite Terratag designs, but still, bargains are there to be had.Terratag Specials Page

It turns out that I’m not the paradigm of coolness that you all believed me to be, as I didn’t recognise the name of Tiffany Godoy when I first heard it, but then when I read that she was the one who wrote Style Deficit Disorder things started to become a bit clearer for me, and I felt cool again.This new tee is classic Wrongwroks in terms of ideology, but a bit of a departure from the norm in terms of style. Would I be right in thinking that in this design Marge is being grabbed by the white glove of Krusty the clown? He wears white gloves, right? Or maybe Wrongworks are returning to one of their older themes and the glove actually belongs to Mickey Mouse? Who knows? Clearly I don’t.Wrongwroks

Cool design, homemade silk print (so don’t expect a costiness/link at the bottom), and a cool log exposure photo to go with it, how could you want anything more? I’m sure I recognise the style of the face on the pyramid from somewhere, I get the feeling it might be some kind of Japanese character, if you’ve got any idea just drop a comment please.Photo credits: taklu4she & herbhrb

If you’re the kind of tee fellow that enjoys wearing t-shirts that are as old as I am, then defunkd may well be the people for you, because they sell rare and vintage tees. A couple of days ago they put forty vintage concert shirts onto eBay with the starting bid of one cent, and on top of that there is free shipping to the USA and Canada (though they will ship worldwide). So, if you’re been hunting for an authentic shirt from Whitesnake’s 1988 tour, then I’d be willing to bet that you’re ecstatic right now.

As soon as I see the word ‘vote’ I almost always associate it with a design competition, but in this case you’re ‘just’ voting for what designs Pretty Hammer will be printing for their latest collection. I guess its a good way for them to separate the wheat from the chaff, and help to build some interest around new designs as well. So go on over, check out the designs and get some voting done, and don’t be polite about it, if you don’t like a design, vote that way, there’s no point in being nice if Pretty Hammer end up with a big pile of tees that people don’t really like.Pretty Hammer New Collection Voting

If there’s a brand that I’m increasingly excited to find out about their latest releases, Turn Nocturnal are it, they haven’t put out that many designs, but each one is a winner, and their latest offering is no different. Clearly, and somewhat surprisingly, t-shirts based upon fonts are popular, seeing as they’ve been mentioned in one form or another three times this week on HYA, and as long as they’re as good as this one then I’m pretty happy about that.This tee is currently sold out in most sizes, but they are restocking so keep checking back if you’re interested.

Scribtee, the design competition offshoot of ShirtCity, have dropped a couple of new designs on us, and guess what? They’re both good!

The top tee is called ‘Human Nature‘ and is by an artist called kakolak (read an interview here), and the lower pic has ‘Weird City‘ on it, which was designed my malota. Both are printed on American Apparel tees and available for â‚¬22 now.

I was sure that I’d already written about this, but looking back through the archives it would appear that isn’t the case. I don’t really know what the image is all about, but its seems very wearable in that “its not amazing but it clearly doesn’t suck” kind of way. Considering that Susie Ghahremani (whose surname I still have to copy/paste) is a fairly well-recognised artist, the price point on this hoodie is well below arty expectations.

Matt, the guy who used to write Torso the blog, and now runs Torso the clothing company, dropped me a line to let me know that the website had undergone a revamp, making it a lot easier to navigate around and generally pretty-fying it. That’s nice, but the ‘print meter’ is waaayyy more interesting:

Torso really is about putting profits back into producing more tees from talented artists, and so we’ve added a “print meter” under our menu that shows people relatively how close we are to having the money available to bring out a new design. It will be updated every day and will directly reflect profit and returns from sales that we can put towards awesome new stuff. Once the white marker is reached you can be sure we will have something on the go that we can hopefully release shortly.

I don’t really know if seeing a meter would encourage me to buy a tee, but I do think its a really cool idea, showing that buying a t-shirt can actually make a difference to a company is what separates small businesses like Torso from the big fish, and this is a great way of visualising that connection.

I’m not even going to pretend to understand what the message is here (beyond some kind of environmental angle), and I don’t need to pretend that I like the design, because I actually like the design.Costiness=Â£19 Link

(click on the image to view larger)Human Empires webshop has been updated with 9 new cotton-based offerings of the short-sleeved variety. Three of them are Human Empire originals (middle row of picture), three are from perennial HYA favourites Concrete Hermit (bottom row), and the final three (top row) are by Berlin-based label Violent Elegance.

I’m really, really impressed with the winners of the competition (click through on the link at the bottom to see the rest), but I think that the grand prize winner certainly deserving their 1st place finish. In fact, the field was so strong that laFraise decided to award three extra designers with a â‚¬500 prize and a run of 250 shirts with their design on, although I don’t think any boards will be made up with the extra three designs.

I’ve been getting more and more into type/text tees at the moment, so the Rumplo team must have been reading my mind when they put together a blog post (that also went out in their newsletter) of 30 incredible type tees.

I’m not sure how well this one will translate since I get the feeling that Haynes manuals might only be a British thing. For the uninitiated, Haynes produce manuals for lots of different cars (pretty much anything with an engine in it) so that people can do jobs on there cars that would otherwise have required a potentially costly trip to the local garage. I’ve got one for my little red beast (it looks just like this one, except a bit more battered and bruised), and it has helped me identify problems with it a few times. I really like the idea of Haynes mashup tees, they’re ripe for parody and famous robots or spaceships from science fiction provide decent fodder for them, as this R2D2 design attests.

Le Sucre, the French-named, Germany-based, sugar-loving clothing company, have released a series of new designs that look pretty freakin’ sweet, and rather unusually, some of the girls designs are printed onto tee dresses. They aren’t particularly cheap, but prices do include shipping (although people outside of Europe need to contact them to discuss how much their shipping will be).

Here’s a tee for all the ganguro girls out there, and the increasingly large amount of tanorexic women that would rather risk skin cancer than remain healthy and pasty white. I can hardly talk though, I turned myself pink after sunbathing in the park on Monday.Available from Flippin Sweet Gear

Bats, trees working their way across the zip, some sweet neon piping contrasting with the somber colourway, and even a custom zipper, what’s not to love? (first person to say ‘the price’ gets a pat on the head’)

Here’s another tee for all the “kinda looks like pixel art but it isn’t, its just Lego from an isometric perspective” fans out there. Isn’t it cool how this is a tee about typography, but it uses a font that you can’t use (right, you wouldn’t be able to type with that, would you?). Its probably worth noting, for the cool points alone, that this tee is part of the competition series that laFraise conducted with Vice Magazine.

Costiness=â‚¬17 (just for this week, then it goes back up to â‚¬22) Link

FFee Clothing: In other shipping related matters, FFee clothing are offering free shipping on all orders (even international ones) until the end of May.

T-Shirt Magazine: This site claims to be the only magazine about T-shirts whether online and off, which is… wrong (and Tcritic‘s new look is farily magazine-like too), but lets not hold that against them, since there is some decent content on the site.

laFraise: They can now print up to 12 colours on a shirt rather than the 8 that they had before, which is an increase of 50%… hurrah! To celebrate, they’re making up a test design (only 250 to be produced) called ‘Let’s Get Ready To Rainbow’, which I think is a pretty splendid phrase.

Threadless: If you’ve ever wanted to know, these are the people that do the screenprinting for Threadless (the art prints, not the tees). Also, here’s another magazine article fawning over Threadless and their business model, there’s pretty much nothing new in the article, but it does provide a decent overview.

Pete Wentz: Apparently he likes Local Celebrity clothing so much that he asked to take some after wearing it for a Fall Out Boy video shoot. Presumably he’s trying to save some cash for when Ashlee pops that baby out.

Creative Directory 101: A directory of sites for creative people, obviously, this will be helpful for people trying to get themselves set up in the tee biz (especially if you’re in the UK). [Disclosure: I’m still working on a HYA Directory that would crush compete with this site]

Pikiware: Mashable described this site as being the “WordPress of Online Tshirts”, and since I love WordPress and t-shirts I figured it was worth a peep, especially since the last time I found out about a t-shirt store from Mashable it was Design By Humans. From what I can tell, pikiware is basically a storefront system for people that print their own products, so that you can make your own Cafepress or Spreadshirt kind of business, though I have been known to make mistakes in the past, so I could easily be wrong. I don’t really see this being of huge interest to “HYA kinda people”, but since it does represent something kinda new in the tee world then I thought it was worth a mention.

Instructables: Here’s an instructable about photo-emulsion screenprinting, which I assume would be helpful for those of you that would like to print your own tees but don’t know how.

HipHipUK Discusses Crowdsourcing: This post seems to have become rather business-y, and this is the most business-y of the lot. Adam wrote an article a few weeks ago called “Which risks and problems will companies, that run Crowdsourcing business models, face in the future? Amongst other things” that I think should probably be a must read for any of you out there that are running a design competition or thinking about running a design competition.

Photojojo: They’ve got an article all about shooting pictures for use on eBay, but a lot of the techniques can also be applied to taking products shots for your tees and hoodies. There’s also a video on the same subject at Etsy if you don’t feel like reading.